Summary
This second collection of Gaho Fuzoku Kitan is organized as an unusually image-dominant survey of erotic restraint, punishment imagery, fetish costume, and sensational fiction. After a cover announcing a visual compendium of abnormal customs, the opening leaves combine historical prints and photographs before a formal contents spread introduces three long photographic groupings, illustrated galleries, foreign and historical material, and several fictional or documentary narratives.
The first half is dominated by staged photographic sequences. Women are posed with rope, cloth, furniture, architectural fittings, garden rocks, water, ladders, chairs, bedding, and tiled bathing spaces. The layouts repeatedly convert domestic rooms and landscaped gardens into theatrical sites of captivity. Short captions assign each configuration a dramatic title, moving from suspension and compact body-folding to chair bondage, outdoor exposure, bath scenes, blindfolding, gagging, and poses framed as human cargo or living ornaments. A separate eight-view portfolio emphasizes intoxication, languor, and costume, while later blue-toned and sepia sequences study increasingly varied knots and restraints.
The middle section shifts from photography to historical and international visual culture. An “Abnormal Secret Picture Exhibition” reproduces images of whipping, corporal punishment, executions, public humiliation, and grotesque caricature. The following gallery surveys women in riding clothes, trousers, boots, masculine dress, same-sex dominance, and self-punishment imagery. A substantial illustrated essay on women wearing trousers links fashion, cross-dressing, performance, and gendered spectacle.
The final third returns to prose and illustrated narrative. It includes a sensational account of eccentric and unusual customs, the supernatural tale “A Single Thought of Love Becomes a Snake,” lurid overseas stories such as “Human Steak,” “Journey Through the Desert of Death,” and “The Ice Field Crazed by Desire,” an illustrated guillotine feature, a documentary-style survey of gruesome murder scenes, and the period melodrama “The Torment of Kichiya in Mad Love.” Together these sections give the issue an encyclopedic yet theatrical identity, combining staged bondage photography, historical punishment iconography, gender transgression, crime reporting, exoticized foreign settings, and illustrated erotic melodrama. The closing page contains publication data and notices.
Highlights
A formal two-page-style contents design printed on a single PDF spread organizes the issue into three photographic groupings, art galleries, overseas stories, illustrated fiction, and documentary features.
editorial structure
PDF 4
The opening photographic portfolio develops a sequence of compact suspension, body-folding, furniture bondage, outdoor water imagery, and staged domestic captivity.
The second photographic grouping uses chairs, beds, bathing spaces, garden rocks, and rope to create a catalogue of poses with individually titled tableaux.
“Eight Views of Intoxicated Female Bodies” presents a concentrated black-and-white sequence of bound women, each image captioned with the name of an alcoholic drink.
The third photographic grouping shifts into blue-toned printing and emphasizes blindfolding, bed restraint, outdoor tree bondage, inverted shrimp positions, and tiled-room tableaux.
The “Abnormal Secret Picture Exhibition” reproduces historical and foreign imagery of whipping, corporal punishment, executions, public humiliation, and grotesque figures.
The illustrated gallery on riding women, trousered women, boots, same-sex domination, and self-punishment documents the magazine’s interest in gender variance and fetish clothing.
“A Single Thought of Love Becomes a Snake” combines prose, ukiyo-e-derived imagery, and modern illustration in a supernatural tale of erotic fixation.
The closing narrative cluster combines exoticized overseas violence, guillotine imagery, murder-scene photography, and an illustrated Edo-period tale of obsessive love.